Common Lisp. As a result of my getting involved (again) in TUNES, i'm learning at last Common Lisp. I've begun with Successful lisp, and Paul Graham's classic On Lisp will follow. Right now, i still prefer Scheme, but we will see.

Ruby. I've been reading a lot about Ruby lately (yes, fxn, there is order in this universe ;-) and really like it: it combines the power of Perl with a nifty object system, plus a handful of refreshing ideas (like, e.g., iterators). It will probably become my scripting language of choice.

emacs-wiki is an Emacs mode to maintain a local WikiWiki. I'm using it to keep personal notes on a local repository, neatly organised and hyperlinked, and all in ASCII format! Font lock makes them visually appealing, and you can even export your pages to HTML. Just another reason for never leave Emacs. Definitely worth a try.

After using FreeBSD for a few months, and having to recompile all my installed ports due to an upgrade to version 5.0, i have returned to Debian: it took just two hours to update the old installed system to a spiffy Sarge distribution, without a quirk. FreeBSD ports are a far call from apt and friends.